ed in deep ultramarine blue, the foregrounds in
rich green and brown; there were no effects of sunshine and shadow, but
a generally quiet glow over the whole scene; and the clouds, though now
rolling in irregular masses, and sometimes richly involved among the
hills, were never varied in conception, or studied from nature. There
were no changes of weather in them, no rain clouds or fair-weather
clouds, nothing but various shapes of the cumulus or cirrus, introduced
for the sake of light on the deep blue sky. Tintoret and Bonifazio
introduced more natural effects into this monotonous landscape: in their
works we meet with showers of rain, with rainbows, sunsets, bright
reflections in water, and so on; but still very subordinate, and
carelessly worked out, so as not to justify us in considering their
landscape as forming a class by itself.

[Illustration: PLATE XV. (Fig. 23.)]

88. _Fig._ 23, which is a branch of a tree from the background of
Titian's "St. Jerome," at Milan, compared with _fig._ 20, will give you
a distinct idea of the kind of change which took place from the time of
Giotto to that of Titian, and you will find that this whole range of
landscape may be conveniently classed in three divisions, namely,
_Giottesque_, _Leonardesque_, and _Titianesque_; the Giottesque
embracing nearly all the work of the fourteenth, the Leonardesque that
of the fifteenth, and the Titianesque that of the sixteenth century. Now
you see there remained a fourth step to be taken,--the doing away
with conventionalism altogether, so as to create the perfect art of
landscape painting. The course of the mind of Europe was to do this; but
at the very moment when it ought to have been done, the art of all
civilized nations was paralyzed at once by the operation of the
poisonous elements of infidelity and classical learning together, as I
have endeavored to show elsewhere. In this paralysis, like a soldier
shot as he is just gaining an eminence, the art of the seventeenth
century struggled forward, and sank upon the spot it had been
endeavoring to attain. The step which should have freed landscape from
conventionalism was actually taken by Claude and Salvator Rosa, but
taken in a state of palsy,--taken so as to lose far more than was
gained. For up to this time, no painter ever had thought of drawing
anything, pebble or blade of grass, or tree or mountain, but as well and
distinctly as he could; and if he could not draw it completely, he